Pop Quiz #469

Okay, here’s a stumper for you. Or rather, it has me stymied. Really. No tricks. I want to know what this tool is used for. This is not the original tool but it’s a reasonable facsimile. I made this up from memory. I found the original in a leather coat manufacturing facility that was going out of business. It’s a hand tool with two narrow metal pieces sticking out of it. In the top of each metal piece, was a squarish hole. My facsimile uses two needles stuck in the top of a hair pipe bone bead (as was the original). The original didn’t use needles but I’m confounded as to what the metal parts were in that tool. The original metal pieces were flat but sized similarly to needles although they were not round like needles. Still, it’s the concept of the tool that nags me. Why would anybody need two needle type thingies sticking out of a hand tool? Whatever could this have been used for? Here’s some pictures

The side view is a little blurry but you can see there’s two stuck in there. Also, the original tool had the metal offset (as these needles are). The holes didn’t align exactly. I wonder if that mattered or if that was a side affect of jury rigging a hand tool.

Here’s the tool full size. The bone is 4″ long if that helps. The original used a shorter bone but it wasn’t as comfortable to handle -but then, I have large hands.

It’d probably help to know the kind of leather jackets they were making which would be “southwestern style”. Here’s a sample of the sort of thing they made:

[And in case you wonder, I didn’t have a hand in the design of this jacket. My “V’s” always match exactly; the one above is offset. That’s because the pattern for the above jacket was a two per (how annoying). You can’t do two-per on an overlapping “V” and expect the V to match.]

This company did a lot of bead work and hand attaching of hair pipe (those longish white things). Native Americans used hairpipe as breast plates for battle. By the way, I have close to 200 pounds of these, assuming you’re in the market for some 4″ long ones. The ones in the photo above are cheapies, maybe 1.5″ long.

Any idea of how this tool was used? Any guesses? When I had the original, I went so far as to thread it and play around with tying off beads and hairpipe but I just couldn’t figure it out. Knowing my luck, it was nothing. A worker got bored and wondered how many of those flat metal thingies they could stick in the end of a hairpipe, not knowing that later on it’d bug somebody like me forever.

You can safely disregard anything below this; it’s a preamble of how I got on the topic of this phantom limb of mine.

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Kathleen started production patternmaking in 1981. Starting in 1993, she began providing consulting and engineering services to manufacturers, small companies, and startups with an emphasis on developing owner-operator domestic cut-and-sew operations. In 2015 she opened a 5,000 sqft. fully equipped sewing factory: The Sewing Factory School. Kathleen is the author of The Entrepreneur’s Guide to Sewn Product Manufacturing, the most highly rated book of any topic in the garment industry. She's been mentioned numerous times in the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Forbes, National Public Radio, Boston Globe, LA Times, Vogue, French Vogue and has at least 15 Project Runway alums at last count. Kathleen writes nearly all of the articles on Fashion-Incubator.com and hosts its forum, the largest private online community for apparel manufacturers on the web.

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Often described as the garment industry “blue book,” Kathleen's book is the most highly rated guide to the business. The Entrepreneur's Guide to Sewn Product Manufacturing is guaranteed to get you off to a solid start or your money back. Many service providers will require you to read it before they’ll work with you.

So I bought a sewing factory by Kathleen Fasanella 0 July 6, 2015 So I bought a sewing factory makes a good title but the truther is that I bought a near perfectly sized industrial building and remodeled it to become a sewing factory. So how did it happen? Well, I was going along, thinking yet agai…